Tech | Opinion
What’s Wrong With Porn ID Verification Laws?
The laws requiring the visitors of adult sites to show ID are misleading, ineffective, and possibly dangerous.
Sometimes, though certainly not always, the best way to understand the present is to understand the past. In the immortal words of Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” And even when it comes to breaking new ground, history frequently proves a helpful guide.
In the year 2000, the digital age was in its infancy. Though they didn’t know it yet, the music business was about to be devoured. A simple, yet menacing computer program lurked just beyond the horizon, and the ensuing clash—between record companies and software—would become one of the most infamous cases of tech disruption in history.
Legend has it that Napster, like most tech companies in the Silicon Valley sphere, was born kicking and screaming in a college dorm room in 1999. In the era of tapes and CDs, a Comp Sci student named Shawn Fanning wanted an easier way to share music with friends and built Napster to do just that.
You couldn’t stream media in 1999. When painfully slow 14.4 and 56k modems were the norm, bandwidth was precious, and downloading high-quality files took…
